The last time Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson co-starred was in 2005’s Wedding Crashers, a comedy of raunch that grew a conscience and sacrificed its funny bone. Their re-pairing is the best thing about The Internship, more or less a two-hour advertisement for Google masquerading as a fish-out-of-water farce. That thefilmends up floundering is not really their fault. These two belong on screen together: when they’re not completing each other’s sentences, they’re completing them wrongly, which is even better.

Recession looms over the movie like a strangely bright idea – no one really suffers. Vaughn and Wilson play a pair of hucksterish salesmen who find themselves downsized and apply for Google’s intern program, despite two disadvantages: they’re twice the age of their thrusting competitors, and have all the internet savvy of Shelley Winters. Somehow, through a combination of lucky bumbling and much-touted people skills, they end up navigating their way through a series of formulaic tests to become everyone’s favourite underdogs.

Almost nothing in the second half of the film is exactly funny, but consistent geniality counts for a fair bit. The pair get lumped in with a gang of misfits on their team who no one else wants - a grumpy nerd, a scared nerd and a nerdy girl pretending to be cool. Inevitably they all crawl out of their shells and learn the value of teamwork. Directed with typically slick impersonality by Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum), The Internship dumps its best suit early and settles in for the long haul: nothing later matches the daffy, improvised fizz of the Skype interview that gets our clueless duo a foot in the door. It’s a great scene - the only one.

Whatever backstage wranglings made the match between this movie and the Google brand, it has the unavoidably smug look of a win-win for everyone except the audience. Aasif Mandvi plays the enlightened face of the organisation, who looks like he’s itching to throw these jokers on the rubbish heap, but naturally turns out to have known all along what secret skill-sets their life experience might have imparted. This exacting but endlessly wise God of Google is such insufferable branding you want to choke him, and Rose Byrne doesn’t fare a great deal better as the bespectacled busy bee Wilson keeps trying to hit on. While Wilson and Vaughn saunter through proceedings with all the oblivious charm they’ve got, everything else backfires: there’s nothing like being told what great, bright, human gifts a company thinks it’s bequeathing to the world to make you contemplate googling - for a search engine other than Google.